The NCAA Tournament rarely disappoints, and this year is no exception. Here’s a look at four of the biggest surprises heading into the Sweet 16.

The quotable coach plays on

The lowest seed of the 11 Big East teams, No. 11 Marquette, is alive after dismantling sixth-seeded Xavier and outmaneuvering No. 3 Syracuse in Cleveland to advance to the Sweet 16. That means Marquette is heading to Newark, N.J., where its quotable coach, Buzz Williams, will have many more opportunities to unleash gems like this:

“Well, we're 3-3 in the NCAA Tournament since I've been the head coach,” Williams said after the Syracuse victory. “The games that we have lost—we lost to Missouri (in the second round in 2009). I don't know if you remember that. That was when I was standing at half court acting as if I was an airplane, and then I covered my mouth and used all the letters in the alphabet because of how the game ended.”

His practice-day press conference is required viewing.

And the Golden Eagles will face North Carolina in the Sweet 16. The last time Marquette saw the Tar Heels in the NCAA Tournament was in 1977, when another quotable coach, Al McGuire, led the school to its only national title.

The lack of Big East teams

Clearly, conferences don’t win games. Teams win games, and individual in-game matchups are hundreds of times more important in determining NCAA Tournament victories than conference affiliations.

Still, it’s impossible to miss the fact that the Big East, which sent a record 11 teams to this year’s tournament, has as many representatives in the Sweet 16 as the metropolitan area of Richmond, Va.—the Richmond Spiders and VCU Rams. And those two Big East representatives—Marquette and Connecticut—got to the Sweet 16 by beating other Big East foes—Syracuse and Cincinnati, respectively—in the round of 32.

“I think all of us root for each other,” UConn coach Jim Calhoun said. “Like it was really hard for me to watch the Louisville game, hoping that they would win. I watched the end of the Pitt game and have never seen anything like that in 39 years of coaching. Both plays. But we think we're going out there to represent UConn, and obviously we are a Big East team. We think the conference just has beat itself up in many, many ways.”

Butler’s back

Maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise. Butler’s back in the Sweet 16 after another stunning upset in the NCAA Tournament.

But really, how can it not be? The rationalization for last year’s shocking run through the Tournament was that Butler had a lot of solid pieces around an NBA-bound player in Gordon Hayward. But now Hayward’s gone. Shooting guard Shelvin Mack has played like he’ll take up an NBA roster spot, but he’s far from a sure-fire draft pick.

And yet, here they are knocking off top-seeded Pitt in the second round, in yet another down-to-the-wire thriller.

“I think it's fortunate to have the ball last,” Butler coach Brad Stevens said. “Like I said, we're not better than Old Dominion. We're not better than Pittsburgh. We just had the ball last. We talked about the Xavier game last year when we picked up a loose ball while bodies were on the floor and laid it in. Does that make you a better team? No. We're just fortunate to advance because one thing these guys do is they play through the horn, and they'll always play through the horn.”

At some point though—and this point arrived last year, not in this tournament—it’s more than being fortunate and more than just having the ball last. It’s knowing what to do when those situations arise.

Florida State survives

With all due respect to VCU, Richmond and Marquette, is there a more unexpected Sweet 16 team than the 10th-seeded Florida State Seminoles?

Remember, this was a team in early January that lost to Auburn, the worst power-conference school in the country. And that was when the Seminoles were at full strength. They went just 3-3 while leading scorer and defensive stalwart Chris Singleton was out with a broken foot; he returned for the NCAA Tournament, but he’s played just 26 minutes in the two games, scored a total of five points and grabbed a total of five rebounds.

Seems that, during that 3-3 stretch, the Seminoles figured out a little bit about themselves, what each individual needed to do for this team to succeed. With that conundrum solved, they went out and thumped Notre Dame, the No. 2 seed in the Southwest, to earn the school’s first trip to the Sweet 16 since 1993.